Creating PDF's from scanned image files - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

13 Jan 2002

...
  I think I have cracked the issue of converting scanned
images into PDF
 using only freeware!

 First off get the imagemagick toolset from www.imagemagick.org
 You will also need c42pdf available at http://c42pdf.ffii.org/

 c42pdf will create pdf files from group 4 encoded tiff images (only). To
 get to those images use imagemagick convert :

      convert -compress group4 <any image file> image.tif
      c42pdf image.tif

 will create image.pdf. Read the docs to see how to build multi page PDFs.
  I convert tiff to g4 tiff with the following

tiffcp -L -c g4 -r 10000 infile1 [infile2...] outfile

This tool takes much less memory to convert.  This is
...
 from libtiff-3.5.5-2. http://www.libtiff.org/ (part of
the tifftools) 
I have a version that I fixed some problems in c42pdf at
ftp://ftp.pdp8.net/software/c42pdf/

If somebody wants a windows binary I can try building a command line one
with cygwin, email me.

Command line I use
c42pdf -q -o outfile -p o --nostretch --noflip infile.tif

It also has a --pages flag to only convert some pages.  This is done on
the fly to convert the tiff's on my site to pdf.

This doesn't create optimized PDF's so acrobat can't fetch them a page
at the time (for good or bad, frequently that delay on each page annoys me)

http://www.pdp8.net/pdp8cgi/query_docs/query.pl

David Gesswein
http://www.pdp8.net/  -- Run an old computer with blinkenlights.